World War Z (spoilers)

Ugh bla….while this the movie was okay as an action flick, it failed on a number of reasons. If you’ve read the book its based on, or heard the audiobook (like me), then it was pretty bad adaptation. First it failed on its portrayal of science, which is all the most agonizing as the book was so good. One example is explanation for zombies having cloudy eyes. In the book, it was an original idea that zombies don’t produce tears and so their cornea becomes scratched and eventually white just from wear and tear, dust scratches, etc. This was one of the nuggets from the book that I really liked. They ruined this in the movie where its an instantaneous change seconds after being bitten. UGH

The ending was by any accounts disappointing and ending on a lull. Pitt is reunited with his family, but one of the biggest criticisms of the movie is that there’s no character development. It’s all action. So we don’t care about his family at all. This could easily have been rectified by just shower a deeper relationship between them, but its like he’s just on a long trip and ho hum. When he thinks they’re as good as dead, we get a whole 2 seconds of anger.

But the war rages on. How you you friggin SHOW US SOME OF THAT? We don’t see any of it, which was what most of the book was about. The battles of Yonkers gets changed to one line of dialogue over a speaker. The assault on the rich people’s compound, which I so pictured Jon Stewart in that, which would have been very poignant and relevant to show the desperation, not even mentioned. Many very cool things in the book that show these things like the Iran-Pakistan war are downplayed to be irrelevant. Only aside to that is the nuclear bomb going off with no explanation. You could at least tell us about it, but no. In the book, man was eating man, both the dead and the living.

So the philosophy of the movie. This is what pissed me off, weak philosophy and science. We are told many falsehoods by the supposed biological genius who offs himself early on. Some kind of Gaea/Shiva depiction of the Earth as goddess serial killer who makes these diseases and implants them with evidence to show she did it. Umm, huh? Who else but nature would be making natural phenomenon? Is there someone else out there that wants to take credit for pandemics. So wtf moment.

Then we are told a pandemics greatest strength can really be its greatest weakness. Again, where did this guy get his PhD? Also there’s this stated need to find patient zero. While that may help, IT DOESN’T WORK THAT WAY! Every single zombie has whatever infectious agent in its body. You know its transmitted by bites in the first 10 minutes of the movie. So just swab some zombies mouths and see what they have in common, rather than taking your best guy into the field. Then you isolate the things they have in common and see if that can cause the infection. Since it only takes 10 seconds to infect someone, you could do this quite quickly. But the government killing scores of people in a lab maybe wouldn’t make a good film. Btw, the book wasn’t about doing this, it was making a history of the event, not finding a cure.

Lastly, we know they are zombies. We are told their blood isn’t flowing. So the final oh hell no moment is the camouflage they find in that terminally ill people are ignored by the zombies. So how does a zombie KNOW this by looking/sniffing at you whatever. We are shown before them launching themselves through windows to get at people. So can they sense this at a distance? That makes no sense at all and contradicts previous events. One can only surmise Shiva tells them if your dying or not. And if this is a supernatural event, then really what good are conventional means, dontcha think Shiva is gonna catch on eventually? So total Bullshit.